[jacobr]

It's not very good as a medium of exchange due to the high transaction time and costs.

There is a theory that a recent bump in Litecoin prices was due to traders wanting to move Bitcoin between exchanges and Bitcoin is too slow.

[etr-strike]

I hate to break it to you but none of the existing cryptocurrencies know how to scale transactions yet. There are, however, many proposed solutions. Bitcoin is aggressively pursuing those solutions.

The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.

[nscalf]

Have you heard of bitcoin's lightning network? There is a layer they're working on that, as I've heard it, allows 1 million transactions a second for a fraction of the transaction cost. It's not VISA, but it's a huge improvement, and makes Bitcoin much more viable. They've been showcasing successful tests, but are open about it not being 100% ready. Still exciting.

[bduerst]

Lightning doesn't scale with users. It can handle 1 million transactions between 2 people in seconds, but 2 transactions between a million people would take weeks.

[smaps]

>The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.

Hard drive space is cheap! Increasing blocksize isn't going to cause centralization, it's the easiest and most effective way to scale for now.

[etr-strike]

It's not just hard drive space. A CPU is needed to verify the contents of the block (and, in ethereum's case, validate the results of any smart contracts). Increasing blocksize also increases validation time. In some cases, the validation times don't scale linearly with size.

[hknecht]

I myself use Litecoin when moving between exchanges but Bitcoin is in my opinion to other cryptos what USD is to stocks. You can compare AAPL and GOOG, but you usually compare AAPL USD and GOOG USD

[jacobr]

Maybe in the distant future, but currently USD is the USD of Bitcoin